As digital color copying/printing increasingly becomes a commodity, print shop operators and other print/copy providers have sought to determine ways to grow revenue and reduce costs. One way to increase revenue is to perform print/copy jobs having high fidelity color requirements. A print provider can usually charge more for a high fidelity color print job because of enhanced color rendition.
In digital color publishing applications, it is often desirable to distribute the rendering of a job on multiple devices which may or may not be physically co-located. For example, in cluster printing a color job might be split among multiple co-located printers in order to meet deadlines, reduce cost, or optimize overall print shop capacity. Distributed printing from a centralized repository close to the final site of delivery is another scenario where rendering is split among multiple printers; which are not physically co-located. It often is important that color reproduction amongst separate devices be highly consistent as color characteristics vary across marking devices and device controllers. Proper color management is thus needed to ensure color consistency.
Image quality sensitive print applications such as photo books or product collaterals typically have the greatest image quality demands while variable data work exemplified by promotional transaction print applications typically require only moderate image quality requirements. Currently there are few automated tools to assist print/copy job personnel in selecting the most appropriate production printer for image quality sensitive print jobs in a document reproduction environment.
Automated selection of production printer for characteristics other than image quality is available in output management and load balancing products such as Free Flow Output Manager (FFOM) which provides printer selection based on job programming attributes.
Printer selection based on image quality requirements is often a manual task performed by production personnel familiar with the image quality document reproduction characteristics of the printers and the image quality requirements of the various documents of the print job. Selection of the appropriate printer can be based on color attributes or the type of color determined for the job. Once the type of color has been determined, the color characteristics can be matched with available devices for the print job. One device is selected and the color document is rendered onto the selected device. Such a method is disclosed in US 2005/0036159 entitled: “System and method for obtaining color consistency for a color print job across multiple output devices”, assigned to Xerox. In another method, the types of color data are determined by a mix of defined colorimetry and undefined colorimetry in the color document and alternatively by analyzing the color spaces in the document and the embedded profiles, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,352,491 entitled “System and method for selecting the best set of devices for rendering color documents”, assigned to Xerox.
What is needed in this art are increasingly sophisticated systems and methods for selecting the most appropriate printer for image quality sensitive prints from among a plurality of printing devices in a print job environment.